Large portions of the United States are currently experiencing the effects of a "polar vortex," an area of low pressure bringing dangerously cold air over the country. Temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast are below zero in many areas, with wind chills as low as -50 degrees.

Temperatures in many cities are expected to hit record lows, 30 to 50 degrees below typical averages. Thousands of flights have been cancelled, and schools across the country have been closed.

"Extra heat entering the vast expanses of open water that were once covered in ice is released back to the atmosphere in the fall," Francis said. "All that extra heat being deposited into the atmosphere cannot help but affect the weather, both locally and on a large scale."

The arctic is warming about twice as quickly as the rest of Earth, according to Francis, and this shrinking temperature difference slows down the jet stream. It then gets stuck, leaving weather patterns lingering longer than usual.

We conclude that the mechanism put forth by previous studies … that amplified polar warming has led to the increased occurrence of slow-moving weather patterns and blocking episodes, appears unsupported by the observations.

20 comments:

Jennifer Francis so called AGW theory called for the opposite of what she is wrongly attribute to the theory today, which is BS.

THE THEORY ORIGINALLY CALLED FOR A MORE ZONAL CIRCULATION, WHICH IS WRONG. THE MORE MERIDIONAL ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION FURTHER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GLOBAL WARMING, BUT RATHER THE SUB-SOLAR ACTIIVTY POST 2005

I'm retired after a 40 year career as a research scientist in the real world around us. You are exactly correct in your proclamation regarding models. Regardless, they have taken root in the scientific community, particularly in our university system. For some reason, the university nuts believe that the more complex the math, the better the model. This is simply pure poppycock...garbage for input provides garbage for output regardless of the math's complexity.

If you look carefully at this world map you can find a "colder" region (in blue). It's a tiny little portion amongst the "hotter"red regions. Someone found one of the very rare blue areas (Antarctica) and the Priests of Drivel are howling their victory.

Did anyone mention that Australia had the hottest year on record? Pretty extreme, as predicted.

Denial kills. The Koch Bros. and Friends who have pumped hundreds of million into anti-science distraction/delay has conservatives tied up into knots.

Example: a typical page from the anti-science denier playbook goes like this, given the following hypothetical.

Let's say scientists predict that 100 year floods will occur five times more often, every 20 years. So, for 19 "normal" years (on average) deniers would crow and hoot, "so where's your climate change?' Then on the 20th year (on average), after a massive record breaking flood, their standard meme will be "one cannot say with certainty that THIS flood was the result of climate change; we had a big flood in ____, too"

Can't lose, right? If climate had actually changed as above, deniers would simply ignore the fact that the odds (and the frequency and the cost to life and property) of destructive floods have increased fivefold.

Seriously? We sleep knowing that these things are not new, that severe weather has occurred throughout history, that it is not any more severe now than it has ever been, and that there is nothing we can do about it, either through quasi-religious self-flagellation or any other means within our present-day capability.

And, we know that quasi-religious nutcases proclaiming that the end of the world is upon us unless we change our sinful ways, like you, have similarly always been among us, and there is similarly nothing we can do about it.

"I think it proposes a new mechanism, but there is still a long way to prove the argument," said Qiuhong Tang, climatologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Bejing. "I can hardly find any observation-based evidence in the essay which can support the argument."